


Human Tonight

by mishatalkstoomuch



Category: Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy - Cassandra Clare, The Dark Artifices Series - Cassandra Clare, The Shadowhunter Chronicles - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Angst, Angst and Porn, Consensual But Not Safe Or Sane, Do You Have a Moment To Talk About Our Lord And Savior Mark Blackthorn, Everybody Here Just Needs a Hug and a Blanket, F/M, Gay Sex, Heavy Angst, Hurt/Comfort, I'm Sorry, I'm so sorry, Implied gay sex, Light Fluff Near the End, Longing, M/M, Mark/Emma Brotp in an attempt to heal the pain I've inflicted, Nobody Needed This, Porn, Seriously it should be called "Nothing but Angst", Sex, Smut, Some Friendshippy Things, Songfic, Straight Sex, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, Why Did I Write This?, nobody wanted this, why
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-08
Updated: 2017-09-08
Packaged: 2018-12-25 06:05:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12029730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mishatalkstoomuch/pseuds/mishatalkstoomuch
Summary: All they want is someone else, but all they have is each other.Or,An alternate version of the major LM cliffhanger ending in which Mark and Emma did more than kiss.





	Human Tonight

**Author's Note:**

> Lyrics are from "Young Gods" by Halsey. [Listen to it,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUhJRQSs6UQ) there are some serious TDA vibes.  
> Characters and story belong to the lovely Cassandra Clare.

_He says, Oh, baby girl, you know we're gonna be legends / I'm a king and you're a queen and we will stumble through heaven / If there's a light at the end, it's just the sun in your eyes / I know you wanna go to heaven, but you're human tonight._

_He says, Oh, baby girl, don't get cut on my edges / I'm the king of everything and oh, my tongue is a weapon / There's a light in the crack that's separating your thighs / And if you want to go to heaven, you should fuck me tonight._

_  
_ Many things had happened in the past few week that Mark had not expected. Emma bursting into his room without warning and asking him to be her fake boyfriend topped them all. He had stood there, speechless, as she had spilled out a story about Cameron Ashdown (llama boy, Cristina had called him at some point, though Mark hadn’t the faintest idea why), and then proceeded to ask again if he would lie to the others to put their minds at ease. That last part had made no sense to him, and he’d considered saying as much, but the topic of love brought up thoughts of Kieran, of riding with the Hunt, of the horror and the glory and the taste of blood on the wind, and he’d felt another piece of his heart breaking. He looked now at Emma, who was so much the opposite of everything he had faced in the Hunt, and a sudden, insane desire slipped past his lips and into the air between them.

“Why lie?” he asked her, and Emma found herself frozen in place. For a fraction of a second, she’d opened her mouth to respond that she had just explained to him why, when she realized: he was propositioning her. Emma was being propositioned. By Mark.  
The thought was deeply strange. She had grown up with Mark; he had been like an older brother to her. Before the Hunt had taken him, Mark had been four years her senior, which had been a monumental difference when she had been twelve and he sixteen. Now neither of them knew exactly how old Mark was, and possibilities were opening that neither of them had imagined before this moment. Could she love Mark? Emma didn’t know. But surely it was worth a shot.  
Mark felt her lips on his before he had even registered what they were doing. Emma kissed him fiercely, and Mark could practically feel months ago (Or had it been weeks?), Kieran slamming him against the rough wood of a tree with a kiss that could only be described as an attack on Mark’s lips. Everything had always been so urgent with him, every moment so earth-shatteringly vital. In an existence of pain, Kieran had been the only source of comfort, even when Kieran was the source of his pain. For years they’d had no one but each other, and so they fought with lips and bodies, taking out their anger, their fear, and their pain until there was nothing left within them but emptiness and agony.  
Emma, on the other hand, was surprisingly soft. Mark realized that, in all his life, he had never kissed a girl before. In a strange way, he was glad that Emma was his first. At the very least, he knew he could trust her. As they moved together, hands and lips and skin pressing together, Mark was reminded of a night long forgotten, two boys in a makeshift shelter on a lonely mountain in Wales. They had loved each other then, he and Kieran. They had still been young, and in some ways so very innocent. Their love had not lessened with time, but their hearts had grown heavier, and somewhere along the way those two boys had forgotten how to be tender.

The way Mark kissed her almost made Emma forget. Almost. She pressed herself up against him, as close as she could manage, clinging to the numbness that was at the very least better than pain. Julian had not been her first, not by a long shot, but the way she had felt with him was incomparable. It had certainly made the thought of hooking up with Cameron again… unpleasant, to say the least. But Mark was nothing like Cameron. Nothing, even, like Julian. He kissed with an animosity that was both exciting and frightening, like the night they had gone to convergence together and she’d flown through the Los Angeles sky with him.  
Suddenly, Emma felt herself being lifted up and spun around. Mark was holding her, pushing her up and against the door. She wrapped her legs around his hips and ran her hands through his hair -- and thought instantly of Julian’s hair, it’s dark, thick curls. With her eyes closed, she could barely tell the difference. Emma quickly dropped her hands to his neck. No, there would be none of that. What was wrong with her? She was here now with Mark, the same Mark who was now kissing her neck and drawing some very unseemly noises from the back of her throat. There was no place for Julian here, especially not when the whole point of this exercise was to get him out of her head.

Mark couldn’t count the number of times he’d been in this position before -- or Emma’s, for that matter. He did his best to ignore the voice in his head shouting, What are you doing? This is Emma! Emma Carstairs! Julian’s Emma! Oh no. Julian. What would he have to say about Mark doing… this with his best friend, his parabatai? Mark shoved the thought into a corner of his mind reserved for “Things to Ask Julian Later” and tried to force himself to follow his instinct. He knew what he was doing. He’d done it a million times before. Perhaps not with Emma, or with any other girl, but still. He knew what he was doing. Maybe if he said it to himself a few more times he’d even start to believe it.

It was Emma who made the first move towards the bed. She dropped lightly down to the floor and more or less shoved Mark backwards onto the bed, straddling him and kissing him with an even fiercer urgency than before. It was Emma who pulled apart the buttons on Mark’s shirt and threw the damned thing on the floor, Emma who tore off her own shirt and pressed their bare skin together, Emma who undid the clasp of her bra and guided Mark to remove it completely. It was only when she got to Mark’s belt that he grabbed her wrists and rolled them both over so that he was on top of each other. It appeared that he had decided he was now in charge. Emma sat back and allowed Mark to do the rest, not moving except to help shimmy out of her jeans as Mark pulled them down her thighs. He glided downwards and Emma threw her head back as Mark did things with his mouth that she had never done with Cameron, that she could never do with Julian.

She tasted different from Kieran, though he couldn’t specify how, exactly. The whole experience was rather the same. Mark wondered if it was because Emma was a girl or because they weren’t in love, and decided that it was probably a little of both. He wasn’t quite sure what he was doing, but he had, after all, grown up in LA, and Kieran had told him, on occasion, what it was like with a girl, and so he started with what he knew and guessed at what he didn’t. At the very least, Emma seemed to be enjoying it. He wasn’t sure how long they’d been doing this before he felt a tug on his hair. Mark, who was quite used to this form of communication, rose to meet her lips.  
“Do it,” she hissed against his mouth.  
Mark paused for a moment, a concern nagging at his mind.  
“I have the rune,” Emma said impatiently.  
Mark raised his eyebrows at her. “The rune?”  
Emma rolled her eyes, and Mark was struck again by the utter Emma-ness of her as she said, “The birth control rune. It’s one of Clary’s.”

Emma gasped as he pressed into her, and had to fight once again to keep Julian out of her mind. How it had felt to have him inside of her, filling her in a way that had been so satisfying she thought she might never be that happy again.  
She was brought out of her hopeless reverie by Mark cursing loudly in Faerie. At least, she assumed it was cursing. She wasn’t sure what else he would be saying, given the context. He caught her eyes and looked quickly away, blushing furiously.  
“It’s… different. With a girl,” he said sheepishly. “An entirely new sensation.”  
Emma laughed and kissed him, and felt a strange emotion begin to wrap itself around her heart. She didn’t love Mark, and she didn’t think she ever could, not romantically, at least. But all of this, with him, it was strangely… cathartic? Emma didn’t think that sex was supposed to be cathartic. But with Mark, her dearest friend Mark, it was.

Mark was used to the Faerie separation of sex and love, and so when he finished inside Emma and rolled over to lie next to her, and she told him that she did not think she could love him, he merely smiled and pressed his lips to her forehead.  
“Friends, then,” he said.  
“Friends,” she agreed, and then, for reasons unknown, she burst into a fit of giggles.  
“What?” Mark asked. “Was it something I said?”  
Emma shook her head and said, “We just had sex and now we’re like, ‘Oh yeah, we’re just friends. That was just friend sex.’” She laughed again.  
“I take it you don’t want to do that again?”  
She shrugged. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was… good. Very good. But--”  
“But you love Cameron,” Mark said matter-of-factly.

If Mark noticed the look of pain that flashed across her face, he must have attributed it to her having to hear Cameron’s name. But it was gone almost as soon as it came, as Emma buried her thoughts deep within her mind and snuggled up against Mark’s chest to sleep. Her head rose and fell with his breathing, and in the moment she hung between the waking world and the world of dreams, like the flash of green at the edge of the sea, Emma Carstairs forgot.

**Author's Note:**

> This isn't quite what I wanted but since this was written in about three hours and is as of right now unedited, unbeta'd, and unread by me, we're just going to go with it. Tell me if you spot any spelling/grammar issues.  
> Please leave comments and kudos, I'd love to hear what you guys have to say (especially if it's constructive criticism).


End file.
